Developing Tasks
Developers can develop tasks (that is, activities performed by humans as part of a business process) as specialized composite applications using the Software AG Designer UI Development perspective. Within task applications, you develop user interfaces that present the tasks to end users. You can also define actions to occur in response to specified conditions. For example, you can define an action that assigns critical priority to tasks that are not completed within a specified period of time. Software AG Designer provides a variety of built-in actions the task can use, or the task can invoke a service.
The user interfaces for a task can be displayed as gadgets in Business Console. You can also develop your own user interfaces with technology such as OpenUI and Angular, and access the task with the Task Engine RESTful services.
Some tasks require the performance of multiple activities. You could construct detailed logic within a task to anticipate all possible outcomes, but such logic would be labor intensive, error prone, and difficult to maintain. Instead, you can define collaboration tasks; that is, tasks configured to operate in a collaborative work environment. You can implement collaboration tasks in these ways:
Automatic (within a
collaboration process). You can configure a task so that when it receives specific business data, it creates child collaboration tasks and assigns them to specific roles or users. Suppose a satellite television company has a new order process that includes a task to install a dish and receiver. Different installation teams and equipment are required depending on the service ordered by the customer. You can configure the parent task to queue one collaboration task to the appropriate installation team and another to the appropriate equipment team based on specific information in the customer order. You can configure the parent task to complete automatically when the collaboration tasks are completed.
Manual (by a user). You can configure a task so that a user who opens the task in his inbox can create child collaboration tasks and assign them to other users to help complete the parent task. Suppose a support person from a magazine company receives a task to resolve a customer complaint that issues of a magazine have stopped arriving. The support person could create and assign collaboration tasks to the database administrator and the circulation manager that request information needed to determine the problem.
You can use business rules to assign tasks to users.
The
Task Engine provides APIs that enable you to search and manipulate tasks from services or other applications. These APIs are provided as Java classes and as services on the
Integration Server to which the
Task Engine is connected (see
Executing Business Processes). The Java APIs are created when you create a task application portlet. The APIs provided as services are as follows:
Built-in Java service API. You can use these services as templates to create custom services in
Software AG Designer that can create, modify, locate, queue, and delete tasks on the
Task Engine to which
Integration Server is connected. You can also use these services to schedule tasks.
RESTful service API. You can use these services with the REST service capabilities of
Integration Server. The services enable you to develop your own user interfaces using technology such as OpenUI and Angular. You can also use these services to schedule tasks.
Web service API. You can use these services to add, delete, locate, and update tasks on a
Task Engine from a client program. The
Task Engine hosts a version of the task web service for .NET clients and a version for regular web service clients.